Mark Trail, 6/9/26

The “Mark’s dad is getting romance-scammed” Mark Trail storyline has had some pleasing twists and turns: we learned Mark “Happy” Trail Sr. was sending money to a gorilla sanctuary due to the entreaties of young “Dreama,” who was hitting him up for money at said sanctuary where she claimed to work, but then it turned out that her pics were photoshopped/AI-enhanced images of Gail, the owner (?) of the sanctuary, and it turned out that Happy had also been sending AI-enyouthened pics of himself to Dreama, so it seemed like an embarrassing incident that would end with two older nature lovers finding love with each other. But today we learn that, nope, Gail is in fact evil, and has mostly been outsourcing all this catfishing to her dweeb-ass son anyway. You can tell she’s evil because she lets gorillas just wander aimlessly around the sanctuary parking lot, without any enrichment toys!

Crankshaft, 6/9/26

Oh, did you think that those pictures Eugene brought over were going to result in some emotionally affective revelations? No, sorry, we’re just learning about how the current Funkyverse cast has in fact been entangled with one another for multiple generations, in exactly the sort of plot development that everyone loved when Star Wars kept doing it. I like how the strip’s namesake has kind of wandered over from whatever it was he was doing to take in all this information. Maybe he’ll learn he’s Les Moore’s uncle or something! You never know!

Dennis the Menace, 6/9/26

Love the look of absolute delight on this woman’s face. She’s the Chief Marketing Officer at the National Potato Council and she’s here to confirm the rumors: the chosen one has arrived.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/9/26

Can you imagine a dog — a dog, mind you — that knows what lattes are and enjoys drinking them, but has never heard of pilates? Well, you don’t have to: that’s the joke in today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, printed in newspapers everywhere!

Gil Thorp, 6/8/26

Isis, a Mudlark student-athlete, was taken by ICE earlier this year, and she’s now being released after much protest by fellow students, and this big local news story with national implications is being covered by … local podcaster Marty Moon, using the same iPhone camera streaming setup he uses to comment on high school golf? Honestly, I’ve never been more concerned about the health of the Milford media ecosystem.

Beetle Bailey, 6/8/26

I have to admit that I’m not really sure what the “joke” here is supposed to be, so I’m choosing to believe that Beetle wasn’t sure whether to dig a foxhole as he learned to do as part of his military training or to dig a hole that would be appealing to an actual fox, so he tried to split the difference and has satisfied nobody.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/8/26

Mae Mae is wiped out by her first two mornings of honest work in years, and needs to go take a nap before dinner. Mud is amorously moved by her choice to take self-care in this manner, and honestly it’s the most romantic thing I’ve seen in the comics pages in years.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/8/26

For one brief, terrifying moment, I was convinced that Herb and Jamaal was going to introduce the concept of polyamory to its audience via one of its child characters. But, thankfully, it was just setting up a joke that’s been circulating in print and online for nearly 40 years instead, which is frankly much more on brand.

Pluggers, 6/7/26

Look, I know that Pluggers has lost its focus on pluggers being hard-working, blue collar real Americans and now mostly dwells on stuff like “pluggers eat a lot” and “pluggers are old and have mobility issues that significantly degrade their quality of life.” Still, I don’t think we should accept “pluggers exist on several layers of narrative and metanarrative and are slowly becoming aware of that fact.” That’s just not the sort of thing pluggers do or think about! They’re down-home regular beast-people, not characters in a damn Borges short story.

Beetle Bailey, 6/7/26

Pretty sure this is the closest Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has come to acknowledging that Beetle and Miss Buxley, as young adults in a relationship in ostensibly the modern day, are probably having sex? Things quickly go south right after that acknowledgement, though, thank goodness.

Mary Worth, 6/7/26

“I used to hate myself! But now I’ve done a lot of work and I don’t anymore. When my girlfriend left town to take care of some important family members I immediately assumed it meant she was breaking up with me, by the way! Ha ha, my head is made of wood!”

Archie, 6/6/26

I guess the joke here is that Archie, who we mostly know through his romantic misadventures but who is in many ways still a boy, likes Ninja Turtles cereal, this being a rerun from the ’90s or ’00s when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were popular (not going to bother checking those dates, life’s too short), and the household caters to his culinary whims, much to his father’s distress. I do like Archie’s mom’s facial expression in the last panel. “Ha ha, he says he won’t eat it, but he’s gonna eat it. What’s he going to do, go shopping himself and pick out his own cereal? I don’t fuckin’ think so.”

Blondie, 6/6/26

There’s a lot of sad stuff you see in Blondie and I guess I should be inured to it by now, but I’m sorry, this is among the saddest. Blondie is clutching her hands together with a forced look of joy on her face and telling her daughter about how wonderful her third date with her husband was, but in her thought balloon we can see she clearly thought she was going to be doing some light making out on this park bench but is horrified and disappointed to discover that young Dagwood has simply collapsed into some kind of meat coma, and now she can’t decide if she should just get up and leave him there or what. I was going to make a joke about how she should be a flapper in the flashback, but the whole scenario is so grim that I simply don’t have the energy.

Is it hot enough for ya, bud? Oh, you say it’s too hot? You’d rather it was less hot? Well, sorry to hear that. Try to cool down with this week’s funniest top comment:

“I like how the dialogue box looks well too big for the text it contains, as if the writer was going to add more context to this scene and then decided no, it doesn’t matter. No-one cares why this is happening.” –pugfuggly

And the hilarious runners up!

“To be entirely fair to Blondie, sexual dimorphism seems to be pretty consistent with Dagwoods and I would believe that you need a different formulation of shampoo for whatever the hell is going on with their hair.” –Nichi Joe Young, on BlueSky

“Alice’s attempt to run away from her horrible husband and son was thwarted again. Keep on trying, Alice, I believe in you!” –Ettorre

“I’m fixated on the rubber duck in today’s strip. For one thing, it’s not yellow, and since this is a Sunday strip the odds are good that that is the cartoonist’s original vision. I’m sure there are plenty of white rubber ducks out there available for purchase, but in a visually conservative medium like comic strips it’s a shocking innovation. It’s also not floating on the water, instead sitting precariously on the edge of the bathtub while it’s forced to be audience to Dagwood’s off-key warbling. Finally, it just appears in the second panel of the second row—it’s not there in the previous panel, and Dagwood isn’t carrying it at any point. I’m not sure how or if these facts form a coherent whole, and you may think it’s pedantic to harp on such minor details, but considering Dagwood specifically mentions it I feel justified in focusing on it, especially since the alternative is to just pay attention to the quintillionth ‘ha ha, Dagwood sure likes food!’ punchline.” –Vulpes

“Funny that the artist includes a bit of Alice’s legs in the shot to show that she too isn’t riding on someone’s shoulders, thereby removing the one interesting thought one might have about today’s comic.” –Hibbleton

“I love how Rodney has been hit with arrows from all directions at once. It’s as if the opposing army and his own soldiers came together against their common object of hatred, and then some cherubs joined in the fun for good measure.” –Guts Dozier

“The Daddy Daze Daddy thinking his pre-verbal kid is telling him it’s the end of the school year should not make him less worried about having been Rip Van Winkle’d.” –Morgan Wick

“Oh, Tommy. Tommy, Tommy, Tommy. You’re a former junkie and garden-variety moron, but you’re no dummy. The person next to you? That’s a dummy. Or maybe she’s a twit? Keep running, let’s see how this plays out.” –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

“Not gonna lie, super curious to discover what kind of Lillian/Lucy memorabilia Hat Guy has been holding onto all these years, in the hope that it would appreciate in value. If these two are in their 80s, their young adulthood would have coincided with the 1960s, so maybe it’s racy photos of the sisters cavorting with Ringo Starr or another luminary of the ‘big bands’ of the day. But since this is the Funkyverse, it’s much more likely to be something devastatingly sad, like one of Lucy’s discarded stockings. Either way, let the laughs ensue!” –Doctor Moreau (Not a Doctor)

“Yep, not a lot of room in a coffin. Dying? Oh, probably. This is Crankshaft after all. I just assumed I’m dying and decided to get ahead on things” –Voshkod

“I’ll take ‘People Who Don’t Have Recording Devices on Their TV, or at Least Don’t Know How to Operate Them’ for 200, Ken!” –Bob Tice

“Here’s the thing about comic strip writers: if they encounter a word with two very different meanings or a word that sounds like another word, they never let go of it. They can’t. Come hell or high water, they’ll turn it into a daily. (‘Hey, wait a second, what if I had two characters called Heller and Highwater?’)” –Joe Blevins

“‘Why have the colors and lighting shifted?!’ ‘Because all is despair, Cosmo! You know this. Now, who’s got a dead-eyed stare for me? Come on!’” –A Grave Mind

“Today’s Mary Worth makes a lot more sense if you realize Tommy is taking a piss; why else would someone blurt out ‘Fro-Yo? That’s cool. I’m in!’ unless they were surprised in a moment when they thought they were alone?” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“I’ve been wondering what this wedding-planning storyline has to do with sports and whatnot but as he’s been gradually offloading all of the hard work and effort on to other people while he stands to reap the benefits and recognition, I can see that he’s simply figured out how to apply his ‘coaching’ style to other aspects of his life.” –Charterstone: Dune

“What does this setting’s economy even look like? The characters are realistically-sized birds and have no apparent cities or such, just random buildings crudely tied to trees. Is the Perfesser worried that he’ll lose his life savings of twigs and acorns?” –ectojazzmage

“The plan is working perfectly. Tomorrow Eugene shows up on Lillian’s doorstep with a truckload of worn-out furniture and three cats. ‘I figured Lucy would have wanted you to have them. Byee!’” –Peanut Gallery

“Pickles sent me down a brief rabbit hole of researching what happens to your taste buds as you age. It turns out that it is in fact common for your sense of smell and taste to diminish with the years, but that skillful use of acids and seasonings can still make food enjoyable! Or, if you’re mad at your husband for never learning how to cook in the last 50 years, you can serve him Fancy Feast.” –Navigator

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